79285440-BROOK-Peter-The-Empty-Space

11	THE EMPTY SPACE

calls for tragedy to be played once again ‘the way it is written.” This is fair enough, but unfortunately all the printed word can tell us is what was written on paper, not how it was once brought to life. There are no records, no tapes—only experts, but not one of them, of course, has firsthand knowledge. The real antiques have all gone— only some imitations have survived, in the shape of traditional actors, who continue to play in a traditional way, drawing their inspiration not from real sources, but from imaginary ones, such as the memory of the sound an older actor once made—a sound that in turn was a memory of a predecessor’s way.

I once saw a rehearsal at the Comedie Française—a very young actor stood in front of a very old one and spoke and mimed the role with him like a reflection in a glass. This must not be confused with the great tradition, say, of the Noh actors passing knowledge orally from father to son. There it is meaning that is communicated—and meaning never belongs to the past. It can be checked in each man’s own present experience. But to imitate the externals of acting only perpetuates manner—a manner hard to relate to anything at all.

Again with Shakespeare we hear or read the same advice—‘Play what is written.’ But what is written? Certain ciphers on paper. Shakespeare’s words are records of the words that he wanted to be spoken, words issuing as sounds from people’s mouths, with pitch, pause, rhythm and gesture as part of their meaning. A word does not start as a word—it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which

THE DEADLY THEATRE

12

dictate the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist; it is repeated inside the actor. Both may only be conscious of the words, but both for the author and then for the actor the word is a small visible portion of a gigantic unseen formation. Some writers attempt to nail down their meaning and intentions in stage directions and explanations, yet we cannot help being struck by the fact that the best dramatists explain themselves the least. They recognize that further indications will most probably be useless. They recognize that the only way to find the true path to the speaking of a word is through a process that parallels the original creative one. This can neither be bypassed nor simplified. Unfortunately, the moment a lover speaks, or a king utters, we rush to give them a label: the lover is ‘romantic,’ the king is ‘noble’—and before we know it we are speaking of romantic love and kingly nobility or princeliness as though they are things we can hold in our hand and expect the actors to observe. But these are not substances and they do not exist. If we search for them, the best we can do is to make guesswork reconstructions from books and paintings. If you ask an actor to play in a ‘romantic style’ he will valiantly have a go, thinking he knows what you mean. What actually can he draw on? Hunch, imagination and a scrapbook of theatrical memories, all of which will give him a vague ‘romanticness’ that he will mix up with a disguised imitation of whatever older actor he happens to admire. If he digs into his own experiences the result may not marry with the text; if he just plays what he thinks is the text, it will be imitative and conventional. Either way the result is a compromise: at most times unconvincing.

13	THE EMPTY SPACE

It is vain to pretend that the words we apply to classical plays like ‘musical,’ ‘poetic,’ ‘larger than life,’ ‘noble,’ ‘heroic,’ ‘romantic,’ have any absolute meaning. They are the reflections of a critical attitude of a particular period, and to attempt to build a performance today to conform to these canons is the most certain road to deadly theatre— deadly theatre of a respectability that makes it pass as living truth.

Once, when giving a lecture on this theme, I was able to put it to a practical test. By luck, there was a woman in the audience who had neither read nor seen King Lear. I gave her Goneril’s first speech and asked her to recite it as best she could for whatever values she found in it. She read it very simply—and the speech itself emerged full of eloquence and charm. I then explained that it was supposed to be the speech of a wicked woman and suggested her reading every word for hypocrisy. She tried to do so, and the audience saw what a hard unnatural wrestling with the simple music of the words was involved when she sought to act to a definition:

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty;

Beyond that can be valued, rich or rare;

No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour; As much as child e’er loved, or father found;

A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

Anyone can try this for himself. Taste it on the tongue. The words are those of a lady of style and breeding accustomed to expressing herself in public, someone with

THE DEADLY THEATRE

14

ease and social aplomb. As for clues to her character, only the façade is presented and this, we see, is elegant and attractive. Yet if one thinks of the performances where Goneril speaks these first lines as a macabre villainess, and looks at the speech again, one is at a loss to know what suggests this—other than preconceptions of Shakespeare’s moral attitudes. In fact, if Goneril in her first appearance does not play a ‘monster,’ but merely what her given words suggest, then all the balance of the play changes— and in the subsequent scenes her villainy and Lear’s martyrdom are neither as crude nor as simplified as they might appear. Of course, by the end of the play we learn that Goneril’s actions make her what we call a monster— but a real monster, both complex and compelling.

In a living theatre, we would each day approach the rehearsal putting yesterday’s discoveries to the test, ready to believe that the true play has once again escaped us. But the Deadly Theatre approaches the classics from the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how the play should be done.

This is the running problem of what we loosely call style.

Every work has its own style: it could not be otherwise: every period has its style. The moment we try to pinpoint this style we are lost. I remember vividly when shortly after the Pekin Opera had come to London a rival Chinese Opera Company followed, from Formosa. The Pekin Company was still in touch with its sources and creating its ancient patterns afresh each night: the Formosan company, doing the same items, was imitating its

15	THE EMPTY SPACE

memories of them, skimping some details, exaggerating the showy passages, forgetting the meaning—nothing was reborn. Even in a strange exotic style the difference between life and death was unmistakable.

The real Pekin Opera was an example of a theatrical art where the outer forms do not change from generation to generation and only a few years ago it seemed as though it were so perfectly frozen that it could carry on for ever. Today, even this superb relic has gone. Its force and its quality enabled it to survive way beyond its time, like a monument—but the day came when the gap between it and the life of the society around it became too great. The Red Guards reflect a different China. Few of the attitudes and meanings of the traditional Pekin Opera relate to the new structure of thought in which this people now lives. Today in Pekin the emperors and princesses have been replaced by landlords and soldiers, and the same incredible acrobatic skills are used to speak of very different themes. To the Westerner this seems a wicked shame and it is easy for us to shed cultivated tears. Of course, it is tragic that this miraculous heritage has been destroyed—and yet I feel that the ruthless Chinese attitude to one of their proudest possessions goes to the heart of the meaning of living theatre—theatre is always a self-destructive art, and it is always written on the wind. A professional theatre assembles different people every night and speaks to them through the language of behaviour. A performance gets set and usually has to be repeated—and repeated as well and accurately as possible—but from the day it is set something invisible is beginning to die.

THE DEADLY THEATRE

16

In the Moscow Art Theatre, in Tel Aviv in the Habimah, productions have been kept going for forty years or more: I have seen a faithful revival of Vakhtangov’s twenties’ staging of Princess Turandot; I have seen Stanislavsky’s own work, perfectly preserved: but none of these had more than antiquarian interest, none had the vitality of new invention. At Stratford where we worry that we don’t play our repertoire long enough to milk its full box office value, we now discuss this quite empirically: about five years, we agree, is the most a particular staging can live. It is not only the hairstyles, costumes and make-ups that look dated. All the different elements of staging—the shorthands of behaviour that stand for certain emotions; gestures, gesticulations and tones of voice—are all fluctuating on an invisible stock exchange all the time. Life is moving, influences are playing on actor and audience and other plays, other arts, the cinema, television, current events, join in the constant rewriting of history and the amending of the daily truth. In fashion houses someone will thump a table and say ‘boots are definitely in’: this is an existential fact. A living theatre that thinks it can stand aloof from anything so trivial as fashion will wilt. In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it. In this sense, the theatre is relativity. Yet a great theatre is not a fashion house; perpetual elements do recur and certain fundamental issues underlie all dramatic activity. The deadly trap is to divide the eternal truths from the superficial variations; this is a subtle form of snobbery and it is fatal. For instance, it is accepted that scenery, costumes, music are fair game for directors and designers, and must in fact be renewed. When it comes to attitudes and behaviour

17	THE EMPTY SPACE

we are much more confused, and tend to believe that these elements if true in the writing can continue to express themselves in similar ways.

Closely related to this is the conflict between theatre directors and musicians in opera productions where two totally different forms, drama and music, are treated as though they were one. A musician is dealing with a fabric that is as near as man can get to an expression of the invisible. His score notes this invisibility and his sound is made by instruments which hardly ever change. The player’s personality is unimportant; a thin clarinettist can easily make a fatter sound than a fat one. The vehicle of music is separate from music itself. So the stuff of music comes and goes, always in the same way, free of the need to be revised and reassessed. But the vehicle of drama is flesh and blood and here completely different laws are at work. The vehicle and the message cannot be separated. Only a naked actor can begin to resemble a pure instrument like a violin and only if he has a completely classical physique, with neither paunch nor bandy legs. A ballet dancer is sometimes close to this condition and he can reproduce formal gestures unmodified by his own personality or by the outer movement of life. But the moment the actor dresses up and speaks with his own tongue he is entering the fluctuating territory of manifestation and existence that he shares with the spectator. Because the musician’s experience is so different, he finds it hard to follow why the traditional bits of business that made Verdi laugh and Puccini slap his thighs seem neither funny nor illuminating today. Grand opera, of course, is the Deadly Theatre carried to absurdity. Opera is a nightmare of vast feuds over tiny details; of

THE DEADLY THEATRE

18

surrealist anecdotes that all turn round the same assertion: nothing needs to change. Everything in opera must change, but in opera change is blocked.

Again we must beware of indignation, for if we try to simplify the problem by making tradition the main barrier between ourselves and a living theatre we will again miss the real issue. There is a deadly element everywhere; in the cultural set-up, in our inherited artistic values, in the economic framework, in the actor’s life, in the critic’s function. As we examine these we will see that deceptively the opposite seems also true, for within the Deadly Theatre there are often tantalizing, abortive or even momentarily satisfying flickers of a real life.

In New York for instance, the most deadly element is certainly economic. This does not mean that all work done there is bad, but a theatre where a play for economic reasons rehearses for no more than three weeks is crippled at the outset.

Time is not the be-all and end-all: it is not impossible to get an astonishing result in three weeks. Occasionally in the theatre what one loosely calls chemistry, or luck, brings about an astonishing rush of energy, and then invention follows invention in lightning chain reaction. But this is rare: common sense shows that if the system rigidly excludes more than three weeks’ rehearsal most of the time, most things suffer. No experimenting can take place, and no real artistic risks are possible. The director must deliver the goods or be fired and so must the actor. Of course time can also be used very badly; it is possible to sit

19	THE EMPTY SPACE

around for months discussing and worrying and improvising without this showing in any way whatsoever. I have seen Shakespearian productions in Russia so conventional in approach that two full years of discussion and study of archives give no better a result than scratch companies get in three weeks. I met an actor who rehearsed Hamlet for seven years and never played it because the director died before it was finished. On the other hand, productions of Russian plays rehearsed in the Stanislavsky manner over years still reach a level of performance of which we can only dream. The Berliner Ensemble uses time well, they use it freely, spending about twelve months on a new production, and over a number of years they have built up a repertoire of shows, every one of which is remarkable—and every one of which fills the theatre to capacity. In simple capitalist terms, this is better business than the commercial theatre where the scrambled and patched shows so seldom succeed. Each season on Broadway or in London a large number of expensive shows fold within a week or two against the rare freak that scrapes through. None the less, the percentage of disasters hasn’t jolted the system or the belief that somehow it will all work out in the end. On Broadway ticket prices are continually rising and, ironically, as each season grows more disastrous, each season’s hit makes more money. As fewer and fewer people go through the doors, larger and larger sums cross the ticket office counter, until eventually one last millionaire will be paying a fortune for one private performance for himself alone. So it comes about that what is bad business for some is good business for others. Everyone moans and yet many want the system to go on.

THE DEADLY THEATRE

20

The artistic consequences are severe. Broadway is not a jungle, it is a machine into which a great many parts snugly interlock. Yet each of these parts is brutalized; it has been deformed to fit and function smoothly. This is the only theatre in the world where every artist—by this, I mean designers, composers, lighting electricians, as well as actors—needs an agent for his personal protection. This sounds melodramatic, but in a sense everyone is continually in danger; his job, his reputation, his way of life is in daily balance. In theory, this tension should lead to an atmosphere of fear, and, were this the case, its destructiveness would be clearly seen. In practice, however, the underlying tension leads just as directly to the famous Broadway atmosphere, which is very emotional, throbbing with apparent warmth and good cheer. On the first day of rehearsal of House of Flowers, its composer Harold Arlen arrived wearing a blue cornflower, with champagne and presents for us all. As he hugged and kissed his way round the cast, Truman Capote who had written the libretto whispered darkly to me, ‘It’s love today. The lawyers’ll be in tomorrow.’ It was true. Pearl Bailey had served me with a 50,000-dollar writ before the show reached town. For a foreigner it was (in retrospect) all fun and exciting—everything is covered and excused by the term ‘show business”—but in precise terms the brutal warmth directly relates to the lack of emotional finesse. In such conditions there is rarely the quiet and security in which anyone may dare expose himself. I mean the true unspectacular intimacy that long work and true confidence in other people brings about—on Broadway, a crude gesture of self-exposure is